Enhanced Course Player / Editor

The new course player provides several enhancements to make the learner's experience better and also supports new options (added in course editor) to fine tune the delivery and tracking from instructor's / administrator's point of view. Let's first look at the new properties available in course editor.

Course Properties

Some of the new properties available in edior are following:

  • Item Tabs - if this option is selected, then player will provide additional tabs to filter the course outline by showing just the lessons, tests, assignments or everything. This is useful in cases when your course has 100s of items divided into several modules and you want to make sure the learners don't miss any
  • List/Tree View - this option allows showing or hiding the list/tree view buttons in course outline
  • Outline on right - this option swaps the normal position of outline and content, and moves the outline to the right.
  • Lesson timers - this option enables time tracking for all lessons, regardless of lesson timing is set or not on any specific lesson

Lesson Properties

In the lesson properties, we have added couple of new options to allow you to indicate when would a lesson be considered completely viewed

  • Minimum required time - if you specify lesson duration and enable this checkbox option, then the specified duration will be considered as minimum time the lesson has to be viewed before it would be considered complete
  • Require lesson to be fully viewed - if you have a video/audio and you want the lesson to be considered complete only when learner watches it till the end, you can enable this option. For lessons with files or online edited content, this option will allow you to enforce every page has to be opened before the lesson can be considered complete.
  • Setting both options - if you set both of the above options, then lesson will be cosidered complete when both conditions are met

Course Player

The new course player maintains general user experience same as before to make it seamless for the learners to adapt to new player. Let's look at some of the new features and some chsanges:

Audio/Video controls

A major improvement is done in showing the Audio/Video controls consistently for all kinds of lessons. Whether you are watching uploaded video, YouTube, Vimeo or a linked video with presentation, you will find Play/Pause toggle buttons, progress bar, volume control and mute/unmute controls consistently placed at the bottom and always visible. To seek the video just click anywhere on the progress bar.

 

Course Outline

Completed Icons

A major enahancement we have done in course outline view to indicate every lesson/test/survey in 3 states,

  • bold font - indictaes its pending
  • regular font - indicates its started
  • regular font with checked icon - indicates its completed

This will allow learner's to easily spot things which are incomplete

Item Tabs

Item tabs allow learners to view just the lessons, tests, assignements or all items. These tabs will appear conditionally based on whats there in the course, and whether Item Tabs property is enabled in the course or not.

 

 

Outline on Right

This setting (available from course editor) allows moving the outline to right of content

Scrollable Lesson View

Lessons which are inherently documents (word / pdf) than presentations (slides) are more suited to be viewed with scrollable region which provides continuous scrolling to navigate to other pages. We have implemented this in the new player. The player uses its logic to check whether the content is in portrait mode or landscape. For portrait mode it turns on the scrolling behavior. You can use mouse wheel, click on scrollbar or use the prev/next page buttons (buttons are shown for landscape mode lessons also) to continue reading to next/previous page.

Scrollable View Non Scrollable View

Status Bar

At the bottom, status bar provids several information like timing, and indicators like Full View required (indicated by Fv) and whether the lesson is gradable (indicated by Gr)

Notes

Both user's notes and presenter's notes are shown at the bottom of the content region, and the toolbar buttons allow you to open the notes region.

Presenter's notes My notes

Zoom Slider

For lessons created using Flash (SWF), toolbar provides a slider to zoom the content as needed.

Fit Width / Height modes

For presentations and documents type content, toolbar provides two buttons to resize the content fit within entire width or height. For portrait content, default mode is fit width while for landscape contant default mode is fit height. You can enable the Fit content property for presentations in course editor, to enforce conditional behavior where player first attempts to fit the height but if the resulting width exceeds available width, it switches back to fit width mode.

Downloads / Multiple downloads

Download icon is shown in toolbar if the lesson is downloadable. As a special condition, if the lesson has more than one downloadable files, a drop down is shown in the toolbar which allows selecting another file for download.